Tuesday, March 26, 2002

Pounce is not a German game, but an older (early 90s, I think)American game, though clearly aimed at adults (the box art depictsonly adults playing). Sadly, it is out of print. This game has haseverything. And by everything, I mean it has a miniature toiletplunger and rubber mice with elastic tails. Oh, andcheese and dice.

The games comes with a trifold cardboard game board which depicts apiece of cheese. In the center is a circle. Additionally, eachplayer gets a rubber mouse (a couple centimeters long) with a long (30cm -ish) elastic tail and fifteen units of cheese.. All players placetheir mice in the central circle and hold onto the tails. The playerwhos turn it is removes their mouse from the circle and takes theminature plunger (actually, the plunger part is full sized, the handleis just short) and the pair of dice. They proceed to roll the diceand one of three things can happen:

They roll a 7 or an 11. In this case, they must slam the plungerdown on the table, trying to capture the mice which are sitting in thecircle. Simultaneously, the players try to pull their mice out of thecircle. If they are captured, they pay the active player one cheese.If they escape, the active player pays them one cheese.

They roll doubles. Play passes to the next player clockwise.The player with the plunger puts their mouse back in the circle andthe next player takes the plunger.

They roll anything else. In this case, nothing should happen.They should just roll again. If however, the plunging player plungesor the mice players pull out, they pay a penalty. If the plungingplayer plunges, all captured mice are payed one cheese. If a playerpulls out, they pay the plunger a cheese. If the plunging playerplunges and a player pulls out, no cheese changes hands, since bothplayers were in error.

That's it, and it's a great game. The game ends when one player runsout of cheese. The player with the most cheese is the winner.Obviously, this is a serious twitch reflex game, but there's also thekey tactic of psyching out the other players. When you'replunging, regular fakes are critical for both encouraging mice toprematurely flee and to desensitize them to the plunging motion whenyou do roll a 7 or 11. Further, mice players can motion as though toflee in order to try to get their opponents to erroneously do so.

The idea sounds simple, but boy is it fun. Here's some photos of thegame: [small] and [large].

Saturday, March 23, 2002

I played another game of Lord of the Rings with the Friends and Foesexpansion this evening, and we came very very close to winning, withSauron starting on 15. All the hobbits survived to Mordor, and wewere in tolerable shape, but Pippin had a ton of traveling cards andwe thought we'd make it. Sadly, Frodo fell, then Pippin, then Sam.Merry made it to Mount Doom, but failed to destroy the ring. We got77 points (60 + 17 defeated foes). We skipped Helm's Deep bydefeating foes. This is a great game, and I look forward tocontinuing to try to beat the expansion.

Friday, March 22, 2002

For those of you who may have missed it in r.g.b., Jay Tummelson of Rio Grande Games stated that the Rio Grande edition of Puerto Rico would be out next week.

Alea (the publisher of Puerto Rico in Germany, among other things) hasdone exactly what good marketing and brand building should do. As Iunderstand it, several years ago, Ravensburger, maker of a great manyoutstanding family board games, decided to start the Alea label to bea brand for gamers games. They created a numbered series of "largebox" games; they are Ra, Chinatown, Taj Mahal, Princes of Florence,Adel Verpflichtet, and Traders of Genoa. Additionally, they started asmall box series (Wyatt Earp is #1 and Royal Turf is #2).

Now, had Ravensburger released these games under the Ravensburgerlabel, they would still have been well received, but a few things would have been different. First of all, there's the chancethat some consumers would be turned off by the complexity of some ofthe Alea games and think that was characteristic of Ravensburger, andRavensburger would lose a customer of it's excellent line of familygames. Second of all, with the Alea brand they now have a reputationamong many gamers that dramatically exceeds the reputation (which isgood) of Ravensburger itself. Even with no review or knowledge of thegame, I would purchase an Alea big box game sight unseen. I knowothers who would do the same.

Tuesday, March 19, 2002

[someone posted to r.g.b. pointing out that rubber bands candegrade over time an damage game boxes. This was my reply]

I've noticed this phenomenon myself and came up with something that Ilike a lot as a solution. Velcro makes a product called "One-WrapBrand Qwik Tape". If you've seen velcro tape before, it's like that,but much much lower profile (thinner), and the "rough" side isn't asrough feeling at normal velcro (hence less abrasive to game boxes).

Another advantage of this stuff is it is non-constrictive which means inaddition to not damaging the game due to rubber-band decay, it doesn'tdig little grooves into the cardboard either.

It holds the games together great for both transporting and forkeeping on shelves if the shelf isn't 100% full.

Monday, March 18, 2002

My theme for the day seems to be the defense of games (and versions ofgames) that are often maligned...

color=f8f0ff>Battle Line

I played my 30th game of Battle Line today. I've played agains 9different opponents, and I think I finally am reasonably skilled atthe game. It sure took long enough :-)

I lost my first game of Battle Line. This was back in fall of 2000.Then, I lost my second game. I began to think I was seeing the errorof my ways. I lost a third time. Well, I kept trying. I lost thefourth time. I kept playing. In the end, I didn't win until my 9thgame, and that against a friend who had never played before. Sincethen, my record has been 12 wins in 22 games, or about average. Whatan amazing game.

Some small portion of those games have been with the Schotten-Tottenrules (no 10's, no tactics cards, hand size of 6), but despite claimsto the contrary by some, I am convinced the tactics cards actuallydecrease the luck in the game and substantially enhance it. There arefew enough of them that it's easy to keep in mind what they all do,and the can't play more than one more than your opponent keeps theirpower appropriately in check. Many games, three or fewer tacticscards are played.

In my opinion, this is probably the best two-player game I have everplayed.

color=f8f0ff>Flinke Pinke

Here's another Knizia game that has another version. The "otherversion" here is also the American version, though no major rulechanges have been made in this case. The physical production of theAmerican version, Quandary, is dramatically different however.

Flinke Pinke is a beautifully elegant and simple package. A deck of30 simply produced but attractive cards and as many chips in 5 colors.It's small, it's compact, it's portable and it works. Quandary, onthe other hand is a beatuifully produced behemoth. Instead of cards,players have large plastic tiles. Instead of simple chips, again,large plastic tiles. All of this necessitates a board, since thetiles don't stack/overlay nicely the way cards do. The resulting boxis large (Pictionary sized/shaped), and while the bits are beautiful,it's way overproduced.

While I admire nicely manufactured games as much as the next guy,Flinke Pinke/Quandary is a great game and that greatness is notreduced by use of cards and chips. For me, space is the primaryconstraint in my game collection, and I'm much happier with FlinkePinke than with another unnecassarily oversized box.

I need to remember to pull this out more often, especially with 4players.

color=f8f0ff>Space Beans

I played my 10th game of Space Beans today. This game also seems tohave a undeserved bad reputation. Players who spend a lot of timecard counting can come very close to breaking the game, but notentirely. Certainly, played the "wrong way", this game can take fartoo long and not be much fun, but played "right", it's amusing,strategic and fun.

The "right" way to play is to not think heavily about one's choices,and play quickly. This isn't to say that one shouldn't think at all,but it's not a good game to spend time pondering. The mechanics makefor some fun planning and bluffing. The art, of course, is wonderful.

This isn't a game that will get another 10 plays very quickly, but Ienjoyed the first 10 times and more than got my money's worth.

Saturday, March 16, 2002

Looking at the general category of "dexterity games", it's one of thefew kinds of games I tend to be quite bad at, yet still enjoy a greatdeal. This is not to say I only enjoy winning, but if one losesa lot, it can be somewhat less fun.

I define dexterity games fairly broadly, including essentially anygame where manual dexterity impacts the outcome of the game. Among myfavorite dexterity games are Crokinole, Loopin' Louie, SpinBall,Hamster Rolle, and Pounce. All of these are worth writing more about,but for now I'm going to discuss SpinBall, since I just got my copy.

SpinBall is a game by href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/search.php3?designerid=235"> AaronWeissblum which is basically described in its href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/viewitem.php3?gameid=2794">BoardGameGeek entry. The description doesn't really do it justicethough. Essentially this is a game of trick shots. Because of thenature of the surface and the the ball, you can put so much spin onthe ball that you get some very elaborate series of bounces, all ofwhich seem to defy basic physics.

With inexperienced/less skilled players (such as me), you just shootfor points, and this is challenging enough. However, once the playersget somewhat better, the blockers become critical. Often, one playeris very good with a single shot, and somewhat less skilled withseveral other shots. Their opponent may be skilled with two shots,but not so much with any others. As soon as the second player scores,they can block their opponent's only good shot, and start racking uppoints. That is, until their opponent scores twice with their lesspracticed shots and blocks the second player's only two shots.

The variety of shots that can be made in this game is remarkable.Everything ranging from the three standard shots (straight/back,single ricochet, and double ricochet) to center bounces to "wallhugger" shots make this an amazing game to watch as well as play.

It may not be as strategic as partnership Hamster Rolle, as silly asLoopin' Louie or as stressfull as Pounce, but it really has a qualitythat no other dexterity game I've played has; it seems like magic.

Wednesday, March 13, 2002

One of the (many) statistics I track about games is how long theytake. I don't record the times for individual plays, but just use anaverage, either the stated range on the box or my own adjusted numberbased on experience.

At the end of last year, I noticed an interesting trend. I wasplaying more games, both in number and in total time, but the averagelength of the games I was playing had dropped dramatically. Gameslike Crokinole, Hick Hack, For Sale, the Pair of Dice Games and a variety of others had dropped theaverage game length down to 27 minutes.

This year, so far, my average is up to about 35 minutes per game.I've spent more time playing "meatier" games, like Lord of the Rings,Traumfabrik, Urland, Hase & Igel, Schnappchen Jagd, and manyothers. At the same time, I've continued to play Pair-of-Dice games,Hamster Rolle, For Sale and a lot of other "snacks".

All of this has led me to think about what makes longer gamessometimes more satisfying, but short games so appealing at manylevels. I think the food analogy is especially apt. Vinci is a steakdinner. Hick Hack is potato chips. Crokinole is a dried fruitsnack. Schnappchen Jagd is a big deli sandwich. Hamster Rolle is acupcake.

Some games, however, don't quite fit. Games like For Sale or href="http://www.pair-of-dice.com/games/knockabout.html">Knockabout are fairly short (each in the range of 20 minutes), butare much more "filling" than many other snack-sized games. Maybe whatthese games are is a nice vegetable side dish. That is, they'renutritious and good, but they aren't a meal in and of themselves, butthey aren't a usual kind of "snack". I will continue to make it agoal to have my gaming sessions be "balanced meals". All that gorgingon snacks at the end of last year was ok, but it left me hungry, andit's probably not healthy :-)

Sunday, March 10, 2002

The final two new-to-me games I played on Friday were Ulysses andAuweier.

Auweier was a game Steffan strongly recommended. The theme is one of birds mating,and the mechanic is one plays worms to seduce the female birds, and atsome point a "mating round" gets called, and you see who gets who'seggs. The theme was amusing and the mechanics seemed good, but thegame didn't click with me. With more plays, another aspect of thegame might add a lot of interest: you can stack your draw deck. Ithas some potential.

Bob was interested in playing Ulysses, as was I. The theme here isgreat: Each player is a God trying to push Ulysses' boat around theMediterranean in accordance with their own goals. The core mechanicis when each player proposes pushing the boat somewhere, and there isa "council of gods" in which card play determines if the boat goes tothe originally proposed location or some other. I really liked manyaspects of the game, though the artistic design of the board meant itwas sometimes distracting to identifying routes, and therefore it waseasy to miss a shorter route between two points. Further, two of theplayers seemed to be severely hindered by bad card draws, which mayhurt the balance of the game excessively. Despite this, it was funand I look forward to playing it again some time.

Saturday, March 9, 2002

After a slow beginning of the year in terms of games I'd never playedbefore, I got to play a lot of games that were new to me, and couplethat were "new" in the sense of being released recently.

In January and February combined, I only played 11 games I'd neverplayed before. (They were Wer Hat Mehr? (aka Where's Bob's Hat?),Witch Trial, Die Mauer, Democrazy, Munchausen, Ghost Chase, Imperium,Sky Runner, Fibonacci, Kathai, and Industrial Waste.) Yesterdayalone, I played 6 new games. My comments on them follow.

I played Jumbo Grand Prix, a somewhat older Knizia title which I hadnever played, and enjoyed a great deal. This one goes on "the list"(to buy). I'm usually only luke warm on set collecting games, butKnizia set collecting games tend to be much more my thing (this one,Zirkus Flohcati, Money, etc).

Someone had just purchased someone else's copy of "Siedenstrasse", aracing game, and we had 6 people, so we tried that. The rulestranslation was mediocre, but I think we figured it out. As we werestarting, someone came over to us and declared "Oh, I've played that,it was awful." Fortunately, it wasn't awful. In fact, it has acouple of clever mechanics. The core of the game is these actioncards, which advance you on the race track, but in some unusual ways,such as "advance the player in last place 5 spaces, and move your pawnsuch that it is exactly 5 spaces ahead of that player". You playthese action cards, but must later play them on other players. So,you end up trying to play them on yourself when it is most favorableor least detrimental, and on others in the opposite situation. It's anice mechanic, and the scoring (based on progress at various stages ofthe race) is clever. It was fun.

Drachenland, the new Knizia family game received some positivecomments, so we decided to play that. It's a game about collectingdragon eggs and gems, and has a really cool dice tower as a majorcomponent of the game. Of course, the tower doesn't do anythingexcept roll the dice. The game itself is good light fun, but nothingspecial. The clear gems are more valuable than I realized. It's mostclever mechanic is using "king dragons" to move pawns around undercertain circumstances. It's worth a play.

I was very interested in trying David & Goliath, a whist-styletrick taking game in much the same vein as many Klaus Palesch games(Hattrick, Sticheln, Mit List und Tucke). The basic twist is that thelowest card gets the highest card in a trick and the highest gets therest. Further, colors in which you take 1 or 2 cards count facevalue, otherwise it's 1 point per card. I definitely didn't get thisone, and while I still enjoyed it, other games in this style are moreto my preference.

I'll continue later with my comments on Auweier and Ulysses, the othernew games I played.

Thursday, March 7, 2002

For my wife's birthday last year, she asked for a copy of Pente, acommercialized version of Ninuki-Renju, a stone placing game. Thegoal is to try to get 5 in a row or capture 10 stones by capturingpairs. I'm normally only a moderate fan of pure abstract games, but Iwas very impressed with this. One factor that made it very enjoyableis my wife and I are very evenly matched (neither of us is verygood). Further, it is short enough that you never feel like an earlymistake fates you to a long and drawn out loss, as I feel someabstracts have as a flaw.

I recently played a couple of games agains the href="http://www.zillions-of-games.com/index.html"> Zillions ofGames AI (which, incidentally, runs reasonably well on Linux underthe latest build of WINE), and was soundly crushed, reassuring myperception that there was a lot of improvement that could be made inmy play. It may be one of the first pure abstract games that I'llspend some time improving at since Chess. If you haven't played it, Ihighly recommend it.

On an only somewhat related note, some time ago I learned Hex, another2-player abstract game. This one is a connection game, and it seemedfun/interesting, but not that deep, when I first played it. Most ofthe moves seemed obvious, but I never really played it very much, so Idin't know how much was just my perception. Well, at some point, Istumbled across Queen Bee, a computer Hex player. As above, I was thoroughlycrushed and only had a hope of winning at the lowest level. Maybethere's more to this game. I'll have to print out/make a hex boardand play against players who are closer to my level of play.

Wednesday, March 6, 2002

For the past couple of years, I've noticed an interesting statisticregarding my game playing. Starting on any arbitrary day (like, sayJanuary 1st), and counting the number of different games I play, Iplay very close to one different game per day, for about 4 months,when it begins to drop off. I'm not 100% sure what this means, butone interpretation would be that I have a roughly 4 month "refresh"cycle. That is, if I play a game, possibly a few times, I may havehad enough of it for about 120 days, at which point I may seek it outand start playing it again. Or maybe it's just an anomoly.

Last year, looking at the games I'd played that year, I'd played 102different games as of April 10th, the 100th day of the year. Prior toApril 10th, I'd never been more than 15 games "ahead". On May 13th,the 133rd day of the year, I'd played 133 different games, and afterthat point, I had played fewer different games than one a day.

So far this year, we have had 65 days, and I have played 66 uniquedays. We'll see how long the "one a day" trend lasts this year. Ifanything, I expect it to last somewhat longer than it has in the past.

Monday, March 4, 2002

I played this for the first time this evening, and while it was asolid game, I wasn't amazed. The bidding mechanic is nice (playerslaying sets of bidding tiles face down among piles of resources), andthe fact that most of the time, everyone gets one pile andsomeone gets two, but with clever bidding this can be changed, isnice. The building mechanic (making pyramids with a coherent colorpattern) on the other hand felt flat to me. I wouldn't exactly avoidplaying it, but I'm not likely to seek it out.

To some extent, this surprised me, as bidding and building are usuallymechanics I enjoy. I guess at some level, I enjoy "development" morethan "building", and this is definitely just "building".

color=f8f0ff>3-player Knockabout

Knockabout is an amazing abstract dice based two player where thedice only interject a slight random aspect. To me, it ranks up therewith "Can't Stop" and "Bluff" in the category of dice games, eventhough in most ways it is more of a positional game (like Chess).Well, it's a great 2-player game, and there is a variant for 3.

I love the 2-player form, and the 3-player version has all of the samepleasure as the 2-player form up until the end game. The wincondition in 3-player is for a total of 5 of your opponents dice to beknocked into the gutter. This means you can get situations where youhave 2 dice in the gutter, opponent A has 2 dice in the gutter, andopponent B has only 1 die in the gutter. If you knock one of opponentA's dice in the gutter, you give opponent B the win. This isn't sobad, but once all three players have 2 dice in the gutter, the nextdie in the gutter causes that player to lose and both other players towin. I keep thinking there's got to be a better win condition.Playing for complete elimination has the flaw of making one personoften kingmaker and/or bored as they are chipped away at.

Sunday, March 3, 2002

I played the href="http://boardgamegeek.com/viewitem.php3?gameid=2449">Friends andFoes expansion to href="http://boardgamegeek.com/viewitem.php3?gameid=823"> Lord of theRings a couple of times this weekend. I enjoyed the unexpandedgame quite a bit, and felt the expansion improved on it further. Therest of the group I played with (both games) were completely new tothe game, and with varying degrees of familiarity with the books,though all had at least seen the movie, so had some basic narrativecontext.

First of all, the game is a lot harder now. In myprevious plays, we probably won about half the time and lost abouthalf the time, and the losses were usually reasonably close. In ourfirst game with the expansion, we almost got killed in Bree, the newfirst board. We would have, but because of foolish error, but givenit was our first game on that board we let ourselves back out themistake. Well, we died in Moria. We had an amazingly bad tileshuffle (we got every event tile in Bree on the first two players),but still, we got killed quick. Oh well.

So, having gone through all the rules and gotten killed so quickly,everyone was eager to try it again. This time, we still had some badtile draws, but were doing very well against the foes. We ended updying in Isengard, still fairly early in the whole process, but we'dnearly achieved a military victory (we'd killed 27 of the 30 foes)with three hobbits killed. I worry that the game may be almostimpossible to win except by military victory.

Ok, that's not quite true. I just wonder whether by making the gamemore difficult, it doesn't make that victory more luck dependent. Inthe "basic" game, a long series of events hurts, but as long as youget a few turns in there, you can usually do OK. With the F&Fexpansion, a long series of events interrupted by a few action tilesis worse, because of the impending threat of being overrun by foes.The occasional bad tile mix in the original seemed annoying, but lesslikely to be fatal. It seems to really hurt now. That said, I reallylike a challenge, but would like to think it is somewhat more skillbased. I'm tempted to do the following; instead of shuffling theentire tile set, shuffle the 11 bad tiles and the 12 "good" tilesseperately, then create two piles one of 11 (6 good, 5 bad) and one of12 (6 good, 6 bad). Shuffle these seperate piles. Then, put thestack of 12 on top of the stack of 11.

Other than the difficulty issue (maybe we just had bad luck or playedpoorly), it is a very nice addition. It adds to the narrative, itenhances the in game tension, and is a lot of fun. I'll play it againsometime soon.

Personal

Professional

I am a Engineering Director at Google. My team and I work on Search.

Previously, I was the CTO at an 802.11 location and security company, Newbury Networks in Boston. In June, 1999 I received my Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab. I graduated from MIT (undergraduate) in June, 1997, in physics. Prior to that I was CTO of net.Genesis from 1994 to 1996.